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Cheerleading? come on ... not only did they choose old and obsolete, closed-source platform that is a pure example of vendor-lockin model, but they also paid for it! could it be more ridiculous?

Edited 2013-02-18 09:27 UTC

I think he was just being curious and I will say I am too, I mean why would you want to put a decade plus IRIX system on the net? I mean I can see wanting to play with the OS for old times sake but what is the point of porting a really old version of FF to it?

it can't be for security reasons, there have been too many releases since 3.x, not to mention I doubt seriously anybody is writing bugs for IRIX systems anymore. Can't really be for features as its not like FF 3.x on MIPS is gonna be running flash or playing HTML V5, so why? why not just use whatever browser the last version of IRIX came with and call it a day?

There is an interesting, decade long thread on the topic over at http://forums.nekochan.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=152

I still use IRIX as my preferred UNIX desktop environment. Even though the gui is dated in some respects, there are still a fair number of people who believe that the "IRIX Interactive Desktop" gui has the best balance of power and simplicity/consistency, particularly when compared with the constantly changing gadgets and distractions found in many of the open source desktops. Of course, as time goes on and newer systems outpace the older SGIs, I find that I use mine more and more as a glorified X11 terminal, rather than as a production system. On the other hand, while the later IRIX machines (Fuel, Tezro) may no longer be performance champs, they can do surprisingly well with pro-level animation and rendering software.

Also, people who are interested in learning about the principles of scaling apps across large, multi-cpu systems can find old 8, 16, 32 -- and even larger -- SGI systems for very little money. Maybe not practical for production, but very nice for learning about parallelization and app design.

You know, it's like riding a mule, when everyone else is using car or jet. Although this comparison lacks ecological context, unfortunately

In my case, I rescued an SGI system in perfect operating condition from being thrown away. Many of them are/were marvels of industrial design in my opinion, and the idea of just throwing it away bothered me. Naturally once I had gone through the trouble of lugging it up six flights of stairs (this is an Indigo2, more luggable than some SGIs), it seemed silly not to turn the thing on for curiosity's sake.

Once I had learned enough about IRIX and the hardware to get it on my network and install Konqueror (which was the most usable browser on IRIX at that time) I found I actually liked the IRIX desktop environment a lot. If there's ever a stable 4Dwm clone for Linux, I would quite likely use it as my standard DE.

Of course they're terribly out of date now, but still it's surprising how much you can do with a system from ~1996.